Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Oh, to be in England, now that an election is here

Just as Tony Blair when he became a Catholic doubtless had one hell of a lot of confessing to do, I too must like any honest revolutionary face up to making a tactical mistake recently. No, I didn't spend time reading the websites of The Tony Blair Sports Foundation or go looking for that of The Tony Blair Faith Foundation. No, even worse than that - I sadly missed out on the first decent piece of class struggle in Britain for some time on 'Fightback Thursday' (which saw among other things the first national teachers strike in Britain for 21 years), and I also missed out on the Love Music Hate Racism Carnival in London, which was apparently also kick-ass.

I am therefore hardly in any sort of position to provide any sort of Marxist analysis of the state of British politics at the moment - other than to say that it is in a right state. For those outside Britain, the main things to note about the parties are as follows.

New Labour are currently living through a nightmare of their own making, the result of their complete and utter dependence on attempting to satisfy the every whim of big business. Gordon Brown, the one-time intellectual heavyweight of legend, has in power proved himself to be a cultural philistine who when he isn't banging on about 'Britishness' spends time denouncing Robert Mugabe, presumably on the grounds that the Zimbabwean dictator is just about the one world leader on the planet who makes Brown's own leadership style and abilities look good. Brown has however achieved one thing few would have expected - making Foreign Secretary David Miliband look charismatic.

Given New Labour's ever steady march to the right, the Tories - led by David Cameron, George Osbourne and Boris Johnson (three Old Etonian members of Oxford's exclusive Bullingdon Club - see picture above) - are currently trying a clever if tricky political manouevre - sneaking up on the Left by attempting to pass themselves off as working class heroes determined to make poverty history. This would be laughable if only there wasn't a danger that the Tories might make gains - not because of any particular rise in support for them but because New Labour's incompetence and general betrayal of working class interests mean that the Labour core vote will stay at home in dismay.

What kind of protest vote will be seen on Thursday remains to be seen. The British Nazi Party remain a threat - even though their London Mayoral candidate seems to have had other things on his mind recently than politics. That there is a palpable interest in giving Brown a kicking is, however, apparent even from the limited amounts of election leafleting I have done myself. It is to be hoped that those like the Left List putting forward an anti-war and anti-capitalist alternative to the mainstream parties succeed in galvanising this mood to some extent, and in the process strengthen the movements on the streets, which still seem to remain quite vibrant, and in the workplaces where an outbreak of militancy looks increasingly decidedly on the agenda. Lets hope May 1 this year is not simply an official day of the working class - but becomes a day in which the long awaited fightback of the British working class against neoliberalism, racism and war is registered in the electoral arena.

Tariq Ali on the Khyber Impasse

'The current occupation of Afghanistan naturally recalls colonial operations in the region, not just to Afghans but to some Western myth-makers—usually British, but with a few Subcontinental mimics—who try to draw lessons from the older model; the implication being that the British were ‘good imperialists’ who have a great deal to teach the brutish, impatient Americans. The British administrators were, for the most part, racist to the core, and their self-proclaimed ‘competence’ involved the efficient imposition of social apartheid in every colony they controlled. They could be equally brutal in Africa, the Middle East and India. Though a promise of civilizational uplift was required as ideological justification, then as now, the facts of the colonial legacy speak for themselves. In 1947, the year the British left India, the overwhelming majority of midnight’s children were illiterate, and 85 per cent of the economy was rural.

Not bad intentions or botched initiatives, but the imperial presence itself was the problem. Kipling is much quoted today by editorialists urging a bigger Western ‘footprint’ in Afghanistan, but even he was fully aware of the hatred felt by the Pashtuns for the British, and wrote as much in one of his last despatches from Peshawar in April 1885 to the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore:

Pathans, Afridis, Logas, Kohistanis, Turcomans and a hundred other varieties of the turbulent Afghan race, are gathered in the vast human menagerie between the Edwardes Gate and the Ghor Khutri. As an Englishman passes, they will turn to scowl on him, and in many cases to spit fluently on the ground after he has passed. One burly, big-paunched ruffian, with shaven head and a neck creased and dimpled with rolls of fat, is specially zealous in this religious rite—contenting himself with no perfunctory performance, but with a whole-souled expectoration, that must be as refreshing to his comrades as it is disgusting to the European.

One reason among many for the Pashtuns’ historic resentment was the torching of the famous bazaar in Kabul, a triumph of Mughal architecture. Ali Mardan Khan, a renowned governor, architect and engineer, had built the chahr-chatta (four-sided) roofed and arcaded central market in the 17th century on the model of those in old Euro-Arabian Muslim cities—Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Palermo or Córdoba. It was regarded as unique in the region; nothing on the same scale was built in Lahore or Delhi. The bazaar was deliberately destroyed in 1842 by General Pollock’s ‘Army of Retribution’, remembered as amongst the worst killers, looters and marauders ever to arrive in Afghanistan, a contest in which competition remains strong. Defeated in a number of cities and forced to evacuate Kabul, the British punished its citizens by removing the market from the map. What will remain of Kabul when the current occupiers finally withdraw is yet to be seen, but its spreading mass of deeply impoverished squatter settlements suggest that it is set to be one of the major new capitals of the ‘planet of slums’.

How to fight both Islamophobia and anti-semitism

The case for voting Left List

[This is the letter in full that Lindsey German sent to The Guardian in response to their leader column in fullsome support of ever rightwards moving Ken Livingstone...]

Your leader (April 26) calls for a vote for Ken and dismisses the smaller parties as not having made as much impact as last time. As you point out, in 2004 those parties gained 19% of the mayoral vote. What you don't say is that not a single opinion poll came close to predicting this result, since smaller parties are usually under represented in the polls.

We are confident that the response to our campaign has been better than last time. We are making an impact among teachers and other public sector workers, among pensioners and students, anti war campaigners and those who feel the cut in the 10p tax is unjust.

Left List candidates have consistently called on our supporters to give their second preference vote to Ken in the Mayoral race. We believe that our campaign will bring voters to the polls who will not otherwise vote and we will do our best to ensure that they vote to stop the advance of the Tories under Boris Johnson.

It must now be clear that London is not going to be immune to the gloabl recession. Perhaps it is now time for Ken to revise the pro-property developer stance, especially in the east end around the Olympic development, and return to a stance which prioritieses the poor over the needs of the City rich in London.

The Clinton-Blair tactic of ignoring your traditional supporters and going for the conservative middle ground is simply disastrous when a really right wing politician like Johnson is determined to stoke every prejudice in order to win votes.

It should be hard for Boris Johnson to win this election but Ken can lose it if he does not inspire and encourage traditional left of centre voters who are a majority in London. We will do our best in this regard, but he could do so much more if he decisively altered course and speak up for London's workers against London's rich.

Left List Election Broadcast for London

Sheila Rowbotham on 1968

Already in the 1960s marginalised groups such as single mothers, the homeless, people with disabilities had been asserting their right to define their own problems and devise solutions. In America the civil rights movement and black power had been symbolically challenging segregated space and racial stereotyping. In 1968, these new political insights converged into a vision of human liberation that resisted cultural containment. In this utopian moment, it appeared possible to conceive new ways of relating, qualitatively different forms of living, even the transformed perceptions pursued by artists and mystics.

With hindsight, it is evident that these revelatory glimpses did not simply derive from the movements of rebellion. The structure of capitalist society was beginning to shift in a manner barely evident at the time. How could we have known that empowerment would be the adman's dream ticket or that the market would zoom in so thoroughly on personal identity. Impossible to know how liberation's potential would be muffled in contorted debates about competing claims of oppression and esoteric discussions about cultural representation that eclipsed basic recognitions of inequality and injustice.

Socialist seminars and conferences

Monday April 21st, 5.30pm, Stan Newens, 'No Bombs and No Bosses: CND and the Left 50 years on.' Monday May 12th, 5.30pm, Mike Marqusee; David Renton, Andrew Smith, 'The View from Beyond the Boundary. The Left and cricket.' Monday May 19th, 5.30pm, Gerd Rainer-Horn, '1968 40 Years on: a European Perspective.' Monday June 3rd, 5.30pm, Ellen Ramsay, 'Moncure D.Conway (1832-1907): Rationalism, and the Abolition of Slavery.'

Mark Lynas on the causes of food riots

What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert them to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world's rich consumers. This is, in the words of the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, nothing less than a "crime against humanity". It is a crime the UK government seems determined to play its part in abetting....The threat posed by biofuels affects all of us. Global grain stockpiles - on which all of humanity depends - are now perilously depleted. Cereal stocks are at their lowest level for 25 years, according to the FAO. The world has consumed more grain than it has produced for seven of the past eight years, and supplies, at roughly only 54 days of consumption, are the lowest on record. The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, has already warned that 100 million people could be pushed deeper into poverty because of food price rises caused directly by this imbalance between supply and demand. Even consumers in rich countries are suffering. We now pay higher prices for our food in order to subsidise the biofuels industry, thanks to measures such as the renewable fuels directive.

Full article here, while for an analysis of the current food riots in Haiti, see here. For a more historical perspective on the politics of hunger see here

Monday, April 14, 2008

New Labour, New Empire Day

From 1902-1958, 24 May each year marked 'Empire Day' across the British Empire, where school kids would have to dress up and sing patriotic songs (see above). The Labour Party when in power went along with this nonsense of course, and so fifty years on, it is not that surprising that Gordon Brown now wants to resurrect this lost and unlamented 'national tradition' by setting up Armed Forces Day.

With the British armed forces essentially now just the 'cannon fodder wing' of the American Empire, one wonders how much popular support there will be for Brown's proposed 'special day of celebration'. Defence Minister Des Browne may want 'some mechanism to help strengthen the bond' between the military and the public, but until he considers the only real mechanism that has any chance of achieving this - immediate withdrawal of British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and a pledge that British troops will never again wage criminal imperialist wars - he is doomed to failure. Yet, as ever, what a capitalist government cannot achieve through consent will be imposed by dictat and backed up with a nationalist propaganda offensive. The re-militarisation of British society is already well underway in schools with a proposed increase in the size of the cadet force.

While Brown dreams dreams of football grounds full of people hailing march-pasts by young military personel while the national anthem plays over the loudspeakers, one is naturally reminded of George Orwell. As Orwell pointed out in 1939, 'every increase in the strength of the military machine means more power for the forces of reaction...[and] leads directly away from democracy, even in the narrow nineteenth-century sense of political liberty, independence of the trade unions and freedom of speech and the press.' One cannot help but note that New Labour's proposed 'New Empire Day' is yet another shift away from any sort of decent society towards a more totalitarian one, even though the words 'decency' and 'totalitarianism' themselves have been brutally vulgarised in meaning beyond belief by the so called modern 'anti-totalitarian decent left'. As ever though, if there is hope, it lies with the proles, and it lies with the real new left.

*"History, that old horse, does nothing...If the study of history—even the most recent—were enough by itself to solve political questions, social democracy would have died a long time ago, and so would Stalinism. Alas, this is not how history works. And there is nothing more foreign to socialism than fatalism"-Tony Cliff, 1968.

"Reformism can never be defeated by programmes. It can only be defeated by deeds… Only struggle discloses to the workers the magnitude of the struggle, widens their horizons, and clarifies their mind."-Tony Cliff, 1969.

Monday, April 07, 2008

State repression of Egyptian workers movement

The Egyptian government has shot workers and arrested hundreds of activists in response to the latest in a series of mass strikes.

Please protest immediately to the Egyptian embassy at admin@embassyhomepage.com

The statement from Cairo Conference activists (below) should be circulated as widely as possible.

John Rees, vice president (Europe), the Cairo Conference

Stop the repression of the Egyptian workers movementIn response to a call for a strike on April 6th by the workers in the Mahallah textile complex, the biggest factory in Egypt, the Mubarak regime decided to occupy El-Mahalla complex with security forces, abduct strike committee leaders Kamal El-Faioumy and Tarek Amin and arrest political activists of every political tendency in Cairo and other cities.

Not able to suppress the protests, the Mubarak security forces usedrubber-bullets, tear-gas, and live ammunition against the Mahallah people who decided to protest on the streets of the city and in different villages, leaving at least two dead and hundreds injured and around 800 arrested.

We send our solidarity to the Egyptian workers and their supporters. We call on the Egyptian dictatorship to release the 800 detained yesterday including more than 150 political activists (socialists, liberals, and Islamists), more than 600 protestors from Mahallah (mainly women and children) and Mahalah strike Committee leaders.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism...

...is now available in book form, though still at an unfortunately high price. For those who don't know MacIntyre, I will highlight this little blurb:

Although Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the author of After Virtue (1981), he was, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most erudite members of Britain’s Marxist Left: being a militant within, first, the Communist Party, then the New Left, and finally the heterodox Trotskyist International Socialism group. This selection of his essays on Marxism from that period aims to show that his youthful thought profoundly informed his mature ethics, and that, in the wake of the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, the powerful and optimistic revolutionary Marxist ethics of liberation he articulated in that period is arguably as salient to anti-capitalist activists today as it was half a century ago.

Pete Glatter Internet Archive

Legendary icon of religious Right takes a bow

Charleton Lynton was Judus Blair-Urh

This week saw the famous figure of Charleton Lynton take his leave from the political stage with a ceremony at Westminster Cathedral.

Blair-Urh

Born Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, Charleton Lynton made his name as Judus Blair-Urh, a role which drew praise from discerning critics such as JP Morgan. Despite getting involved in several shocking scenes of brutal violence Blair-Urh nearly won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Heston Blumenthal

Charleton Lynton was an intensely political figure with a strong religious faith. Early on he was very idealistic and made his name as an eager young peace campaigner and an active member of CND. However, at some point in the 1980s he became a much more reactionary thinker, dropping his earlier commitment to peace and disarmament and becoming obsessed by weapons of mass destruction and guns in general. He also became an early admirer of American President George W Bush.

God, Guns and Government

His love of God, guns and the American government meant that from 1997-2007 Lynton was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, a small outpost of the American Empire. However, at some point during this period he seems to have become diagnosed with an illness known as Messiah's disease. This sad condition led Lynton to some confusion, thinking he was at various times a kind of Moses figure appointed by God to lead the children of Iraq to democracy, and at times God himself at Judgement Day. 'Today is not a day for soundbites' he suddenly announced at one point, 'but I feel the hand of history on my shoulder.'

Planet of the Apes

It was Charleton Lynton's 'messiah complex' that probably led him to support George W Bush's disastrous 'crusade' against 'evil-doers' in the Holy Land. Lynton's support for Bush's drive for world domination led to a fall in popularity among the wider public towards the end of his career, and he resigned from his role as Prime Minister of Great Britain in 2007.

El C.I.D.

Despite his strong religious convictions, some critics of Lynton thought he should have acquired a number of criminal convictions for his reckless support for war and violence. He became a popular target for satirists such a Michael Moore and was like Bush, was even portrayed in The Simpsons. As one commentator put it at the end, 'with a name like Judas Blair-Urh, perhaps we should have seen Charleton Lynton's betrayal of the values of the labour movement and the peace movement coming'.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Paul Foot on 1968: The Fire Last Time

[Hidden away on its 'archive' section, the New Statesman this week decided to publish a superb article from 22 April 1988 on the twentieth anniversary of 1968 by Paul Foot, which I have decided to republish on this blog, mainly because it saves me writing anything]

A considerable industry has been at work for months to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of 1968. Numerous books have already been published, and the television interest reaches its climax soon with an extravaganza on Channel 4. The popular theme is that 1968 was an aberration, a momentary delirium which seduced the youth of the time, but out of which that youth have grown up into sensible middle age. The books and programmes tend to concentrate on the cultural obsessions of the 1968 students, their incantations, promiscuities, drugs. Like an eclipse on a 29 February in Leap Year, such a strange and rather disturbing Happening is unlikely ever to occur again. (Sighs of relief all round.)

Most of this is entirely trivial, and suits the prevailing reactionary mood. No important person today wants to dredge up too much about what really happened in 1968 — a revolutionary tremor which threatened an earthquake to bring the entire Old Order crashing down.

Why did it happen, what were its effects, when did it stop, and will it happen again? No one on the official left will even ask the questions. It takes an active revolutionary in what will unquestionably be the least-reviewed book in the pack to answer them.

Chris Harman locates the cause of the 1968 upheavals in the "long boom" in which the postwar industrialised economies basked. The boom, however, was a creature of capitalism every bit as much as the slumps of the 1930s. Its fruits were not shared either by workers or by the growing body of students it required and regimented. During the "long boom", workers and students developed at the same time a collective confidence and a collective frustration. These burst out all over the world in 1968. The triggers were different — America’s monstrous war in Vietnam, the meanness of the universities in France, religious discrimination in Northern Ireland. But the fundamental causes were the same everywhere.

For a moment, the 1968 revolutions rubbed out the contours of world politics. The "Cold War", the "Iron Curtain" were irrelevant to the new insurgents. Just as Mayor Daley was ordering troops to beat up demonstrators against a rigged Democratic Party convention in Chicago, the Russian government sent its tanks into Prague. The aims were the same: to quash revolts — revolts which for a moment revealed that the "socialism of the ‘socialist world’ was as phoney as the freedom of the ‘free world’." The absurd slogans and antagonisms with which governments and ideologues East and West had bamboozled their peoples were suddenly ripped up as effectively as were the Paris paving stones by the students of the Sorbonne. The thrilling message of emancipation in the Czech manifesto "2000 words" was written with the same inspiration (though in more exciting prose) as were thousands of manifestos issued by demonstrating students in Warsaw, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Chicago.

The second crucial characterisation of the time was that students’ revolt set off workers’ revolt. The most convulsive example was in France, which, in sharp contrast to the predictions of every known political scientist, left and right, experienced that May the largest general strike in the history of the world.

The revolutionary impact of 1968 went on long after the calendar year — through the "hot autumn" in Italy in 1969, to the miners’ and dockers’ strikes in Britain in 1972 (which changed the Tory government’s entire strategy and eventually kicked them out), to the Portuguese revolution in 1974, to the overthrow of the Greek colonels in 1975. Right across Europe, and beyond it, the revolutionary upheavals of 1968 went on until 1976, and threatened the very existence of "society as we know it".

How was order restored — how are we now back with "society as we know it", even more ugly, cruel and complacent than it was before? At times (in Britain at the end of 1973, for instance, or in France in May 1968) the ruling class, even with all its troops and policemen, were weak (in France the police went on strike). By themselves they could not restore their own laws and orders. Their chief allies in that business were the Old Order of the left, whether of the communist or Labour variety. Communist tanks in Prague broke up the revolution there, and, by the same token, Communist-led trade unions in France persuaded public service workers back to work, and so broke up the general strike. In the United States, the politicians of the Democratic Party, in Britain the politicians of the Labour Party laid their "historic" claim to the loyalty of workers and students, and called them to order. This was known at the time in different languages as the: "social contract" (Britain) the Pact of Moncloa (Spain), or the Historic Compromise (Italy). It took the sting out of the 1968 revolution and its aftermath. Once the sting was out, the right wing lost interest in the Old Order of the left which had done its work so well. The political pendulum swung to the right, to the "free market", against the welfare state — to the fattening of the rich and the slimming of the poor; to Thatcher in Britain, to Reagan in the United States, to Kohl in West Germany, to Chirac in France. The office-hunters of the left, who helped lose the revolutions, lost office as well.

The revolutions of 1968-1976 threw up new revolutionary ideas and organisations which could not see any fundamental difference between the social orders on either side of the Iron Curtain, and which doubted that society could be changed by electing new governments, while industry, finance, law, media, all the other big institutions of society remained in the (wholly undemocratic) hands of the wealthy. Chris Harman traces the history of these organisations, many of which disappeared in frantic gestures of individual terrorism or in incantations to the "Third World". He argues, however, and he is right, that the spirit of 1968 and the small organisations which it inspired were and are the only real hope for socialist change.

The steady drift of former socialists to the right (for a wonderful example read Paul Johnson’s "conversion" to the Revolution — in the New Statesman of course), the fashion for "new realism", the obsession with parliamentary politics, all these are creatures of the prevailing reaction, not enemies of it. Nor is that reaction half so secure as it pretends. The slump of the eighties is not as deep as the slump of the thirties, but it is every bit as intractable. The first was ended in a world war, but a world war now is out of the question, even for the generals.

The mix which gave rise to 1968 is still bubbling in the pot. It will explode in a "fire next time" which will engulf the world just as unexpectedly as it did last time, and the politics of the traditional left will be just as useless and just as hostile.

Rosa Luxemburg (1985)

I finally got round to seeing Margarethe Von Trotta's 1985 film Rosa Luxemburg this week. I had known of the film's existence ever since Paul Foot mentioned it in an article back in 2000. This is what Foot says:

'Margarethe von Trotta’s fabulous film about Rosa Luxemburg opens on New Year’s Eve 1899 with a huge centenary party ball organised by the German Social Democratic Party. The scene throbs with gaiety, ribaldry, and above all hope. All the great leaders of the rising new movement were there to celebrate the dawn of a new era, the start of another hundred years, which everyone assumed would be incomparably better than the century of wars and dictators which was drawing to a close...Two characters dominated that tumultuous celebration: Karl Kautsky, the doyen of German Social Democracy, unbending in his insistence on Marxist politics in the party, and Rosa herself, fresh from a furious argument with Eduard Bernstein...Many guests, including Karl Kautsky, responded to the Marxist language favoured by Rosa Luxemburg, though the more practical politicians among them, again including Karl Kautsky, were secretly impressed and even excited by Bernstein’s parliamentary perspective. In the film the argument hovers lightly, almost frivolously, over the celebrations without spoiling them.'

The film is indeed in my opinion fabulous, particularly if one has a reasonable grasp of some of the argument between reform and revolution going on within the Second International, particularly in Germany, that Foot sketches out. It is exciting to see characters like Kautsky and Clara Zetkin debating and discussing class struggle. But even if the thought of seeing a representation on film of say, August Bebel doesn't really do anything for you (and why should it?) this film should definitely be seen by all revolutionary socialists far and wide simply for its moving and powerful representation of Rosa Luxemburg herself. While at times the film confusingly seems to lose sight of the exact historical context, I thought it used Rosa's letters and speeches to convincingly portray her heroic courage and love of life and the tragedy of her death. However, I would be very interested to hear other people's take on this film.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

When Liberals Really Lose Their Way...

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Histomat Picture Exclusive: Bush's Iraq 'uprising'

When George Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by claiming that thanks to the recent 'surge' of the US military, 'In Iraq, we're witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden', to be honest I was initially somewhat sceptical. Probably I had fallen for some of the left wing propaganda about Iraq that circles around the blogosphere. But now, as I think readers of Histomat will surely agree, the astonishing picture above, exclusive to this blog, suggests Bush may well have been onto something...